Curator Robin Clark To Speak at Rice University

Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Anna Foret, 713.348.5770

Press images available

Thursday, 14 April 2011, 7:00 pm

Talk by Robin Clark, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Herring Hall 100, Rice University

HOUSTON, Texas, March 31, 2011 - Rice University Art Gallery is pleased

to present Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, a talk by

Robin Clark, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), on Thursday, April 14, at 7:00 pm, preceded by a wine and cheese reception at 6:30 pm. Both reception and lecture are free and open to the public, and will be held in a campus auditorium, Herring Hall 100. Paid parking is available in the Central Campus Garage. An interactive map of the Rice campus may be found at rice.edu/maps/maps.html and an accessibility map at rice.edu/maps/Access_Map6_05.pdf. For more information, visit ricegallery.org or call 713.348.6069.

Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, the title of a major exhibition organized by Robin Clark and MCASD Director Hugh M. Davies, will be on view at MCASD La Jolla, September 25, 2011 - January 22, 2012. The exhibition will be accompanied by a scholarly catalogue edited by Clark and published by MCASD and University of California Press. Phenomenal will focus on perceptual investigations undertaken by artists during the 1960s and '70s in Los Angeles, generating some of the most vanguard practices engaging young artists today. Larry Bell, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler are among the artists whose work focused on visual perception and facilitated an awareness of the viewer's physical body moving through space. Mary Temple, whose site-specific installation Northwest Corner, Southeast Light is on view at Rice Gallery through May 25, cites the work of Light and Space artists, in particular that of Robert Irwin and James Turrell, as a significant influence on her work, and Clark will discuss Temple's installation within this context.

ABOUT ROBIN CLARK

Robin Clark received art history degrees from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts (BA); Boston University (MA); and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (PhD). She has held curatorial positions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Saint Louis Museum of Art, and in 2008 was a guest curator at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (St. Louis) for The Light Project, a series of outdoor light installations. Robin Clark is Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, where in 2009 she curated Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art, which explored the influences of architecture on contemporary art through the work of artists from

11 countries.

ricegallery.org

Doug Wheeler, Untitled, 1965, acrylic on canvas with Plexiglas and neon daylight light

Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; gift of the artist and partial Museum

purchase with International and Contemporary Collectors Funds and proceeds from

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Art Auction 2010